Category talk:Endangered languages

Category:Endangered languages
The name itself is highly subjective. I don't see any use to a category that will list Irish, Breton, and Hawaiian alongside the more obscure languages of Papua New Guinea and the Amazon. --EncycloPetey 21:09, 14 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Endangered languages is a valid topic of interest to linguists and philologists. Although the determination of a language as endangered is often somewhat subjective, I think most linguists are pretty much in agreement about what endangered means and which languages are endangered. An exhaustive list would be very nice to have, but I doubt that we will ever have anything like a complete list here. I think it’s a useful category and should be kept. —Stephen 22:20, 15 November 2008 (UTC)


 * If it's true that linguists are in agreement about what languages are endangered, which would surprise me, then I agree we should keep.—msh210 ℠ 04:37, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Keep. Most categorization is at least somewhat subjective (Should [[:Category:Poisons]] be in [[:Category:Food and drink]]? Should [[vital force]] be in [[:Category:Anatomy]]?), and certainly most categorization is eclectic (guess what category [[tangy]] and [[distasteful]] share; hint: it's not [[:Category:English adjectives]]). I think this category is likely to be interesting to people. —Ruakh TALK 15:22, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Keep and complete. It's true that this information is both used by linguists and interesting to people, but it's not the only one: we should have all the categories for Extinct languages, Ancient languages, Historic languages, Living languages, Endangered languages and Constructed languages. That way, we consider a higher level of details and have the chance to categorize all languages. Daniel. 09:40, 17 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, it's relatively easy to verify whether a language is extinct, living, constructed, reconstructed, etc. On the other hand, determining whether a language is "endangered" would seem to involve a substantial judgment call, and one which we are not qualified to make.  In the absence of an IUCN-like authority for languages, I think this needs to be deleted, or perhaps replaced by a quantitative categorization (Category:Languages with fewer than 100 native speakers?).  In particular, I find it dubious to put well-documented, officially-supported languages like Hawaiian and Irish in the same category with the hundreds of languages that are actually on the brink of vanishing entirely. -- Visviva 05:34, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Keep, but split into two or more categories for Seriously endangered languages and languages like Hawaiian, which are well documented, but are not learned by many young people. There are endangered languages that still have thousands of speakers - but most of these speakers are aging, and if young people aren't learning them, the language dies with the older speakers. There are two basic ways of looking at whether or not a language is endangered. One is by the number of total speakers. Another, as I mentioned, is how many young people learn it as they grow up. This is the kind of thing you get where a language is spoken by a small ethnic community within a country, like Istro-Romanian in Croatia. — [ ric ] opiaterein — 22:27, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * With 5 votes to 1, kept by consensus. --Jackofclubs 10:10, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

RFD discussion: November 2023–January 2024
Manually added to just over 100 languages. Well over 99% of the languages we cover count as endangered, to one degree or another, which is emphasised by the fact that the creator didn't even think of them when they decided to add this category to the more well-known ones.

I really don't think this adds much value - it's something for Wikipedia to keep track of, not us. Theknightwho (talk) 22:17, 28 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Delete. Thadh (talk) 15:02, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 03:58, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Deleted. Theknightwho (talk) 13:25, 9 January 2024 (UTC)